The rape charges against former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn who, like Dominique deVillepin, is a man...
are headline news across the world, but as Strauss-Kahn prepares for what could be a lengthy legal battle, France is preparing for a 2012 presidential election -- suddenly without the leading challenger to President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Strauss-Kahn, a prominent member of the Socialist Party in France, was predicted to be his party's candidate in 2012 and would have faced off against Sarkozy and his UMP party. Sarkozy, who has been floundering in polls, has been seen as a weak and ineffective president -- a man who promised big change and has failed to deliver. But with Strauss-Kahn almost certainly out of the 2012 race, Sarkozy's biggest challenge could come from Marine Le Pen, a candidate known for her nationalistic and anti-Muslim views.
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No mention that Marine is also tapping into a very deep pool of resentment among French women about how elitist men mistreat them. This is bound up with resentment against the elites of both parties in general, but it has never been given strong play before.
The setting was one of those faux-intimate chat-shows that are the staple of late-night French TV, with minor celebrities and media types swapping small-talk over a candlelit dinner.
With the wine flowing, host Thierry Ardisson laconically invited guests at the cosy soiree to name the politician who harboured the guiltiest secret and unwittingly unearthed a major sex scandal.
For me it was with Dominique Strauss-Kahn that things went super-wrong! exclaimed a pretty young blonde writer named Tristane Banon, and went on to claim that the then highly-respected former French finance minister had tried to rape her.
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[Al Jazeera] A Belarusian court has handed down suspended two-year prison terms to two opposition politicians who ran against Alexander Lukashenko, the country's president, in last year's election.
Vladimir Neklyayev, 65, and Vitaly Rymashevsky, 36, were found guilty on Friday of "actions disrupting social order". Sentences for both were suspended by two years, the Frunze district court of Minsk ruled.
Last week, leading opposition figure Andrei Sannikov of the Charter 97 rights group, who also stood against Lukashenko, was sentenced to five years in a high-security prison on the more serious charge of organising mass disturbances.
Neklyayev linked his relatively soft sentence to pressure from the West and popular support.
"If it was not for the support from the US and the European Union, I would not be standing here in front of you but would rather sit (in a KGB prison) answering the question about who I am spying for," he told news hounds. "This is (also) a result of people's solidarity."
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[An Nahar] The corruption trial of La Belle France's former president Jacques Chirac can go ahead, a top appeals court ruled Friday, rejecting a constitutional challenge.
Lawyers for one of the co-defendants of Chirac, who is accused of embezzling public funds as mayor of Gay Paree in the 1990s, had argued that some of the charges were unconstitutional under the statute of limitations.
The country's highest appeals court ruled however that the constitutional concerns raised, which caused the trial to be postponed on its second day in March, were not valid.
The court "decided that there was no grounds to refer these questions to the Constitutional Council," the body that would have ultimately ruled on the challenge, the judges said in a statement.
Chirac, 78, the first former French president to go on trial, is accused of using public funds to pay people working for his party ahead of his successful 1995 election bid. He has denied knowledge of any illegal payments.
A court on March 8 suspended the trial so that constitutional authorities could examine whether certain charges that date back nearly two decades were still admissible. The postponement drew criticism from anti-corruption campaigners.
Chirac is one of La Belle France's most popular political figures, best known abroad for opposing the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
He is the first French former head of state to face criminal charges since the leader of the collaborationist wartime regime, Marshal Philippe Petain, was convicted of treason after World War II.
If found guilty, Chirac faces up to 10 years in jail and a fine of 150,000 euros ($210,000) on charges including embezzlement and breach of trust.
State prosecutors, who are under the hierarchical authority of the government, have called for the case to be dismissed, raising the likelihood that Chirac will avoid conviction.
Gay Paree city hall last year dropped its civil charges against him in return for a payment of more than 2.2 million euros, from him and the right-wing UMP party.
Chirac paid more than half a million euros of this from his own pocket but did not acknowledge any wrongdoing.
The presiding judge in March proposed that trial hearings be rescheduled for around June 20.
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[Iran Press TV] Tens of thousands of students, social groups and unemployed people have taken to the streets across Spain to protest against the financial crisis in the country.
Countrywide peaceful protests have been organized through social media networks such as Twitter. Hundreds of demonstrators have been camping out at Madrid's Puerta del Sol square since May 15 to demand a 'real democracy' and political and social change in Spain, The Guardian reported on Friday.
Other similar protests have been held in Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Bilbao, Zaragoza and other Spanish cities.
"The economy and unemployment are key to the protest because that binds all of us together," Jon Aguirre Such, a front man for the Real Democracy Now movement, said.
"In this crisis, while some have gotten rich, most people have less income," he added.
The protests come in the closing days of the campaign for local elections set for Sunday. The ruling Socialist party is widely expected to suffer heavy losses over its inefficient management of the economic crisis.
Speaking in an interview with Cadena Ser radio station on Friday, Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said that ongoing youth protests across the country are "understandable."
However, The essential However...
he said that Spain must stick to its austerity measures and continue with its economic policies.
Spain has the highest jobless rate of 21.3 percent in the eurozone and has a record 4.9 million people unemployed.
Although Spain has so far managed to stave off a bailout, economists expect that the eurozone's fourth largest economy will inevitably follow Portugal, Ireland and Greece, and will be forced to accept a financial rescue package.
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The corruption trial of 
